Torque Control

Storying Lives

Vector 249 is officially Out In The Wild, so here’s the table of contents. It is, I feel comfortable saying, a good ‘un.

Torque Control — editorial
Framing the Unframeable — Gary K. Wolfe on storying lives in sf and fantasy
Writing Without a Filter — Elizabeth Hand interviewed by Graham Sleight
Journey into Space — A trip down memory lane by Steve Cockayne
The Modern Storytellers — Jon Ingold on Interactive Fiction
Good Cop/Bad Cop — Alison Page on Life on Mars
Archipelago: Founded on the Shambles — Paul Kincaid on Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
First Impressions — Book reviews edited by Paul N. Billinger
Particles — Books received by Paul N. Billinger
The New X: Storying Genres — a column by Graham Sleight

A few announcements.

First, as noted in the editorial, and here a little while ago, this is Geneva’s last issue as co-editor. The last five issues of Vector — and especially the international issue — wouldn’t have been what they’ve been without Geneva, so this is a public thank you: thank you. (I’ll be staying on solo for the forseeable future because I’m a sucker.)

Secondly, it’s not Tony Cullen’s last issue as production editor, but he’ll be stepping down soon because he’s already stepped up to take over as Chair of the BSFA. And I have no doubt he’ll do a fine job, but it does mean I’ll be needing someone to do layout work on Vector. Please drop me a line if you might be interested.

Thirdly, as Peter expands on here, we’d like to make sure that all BSFA members receive their mailing this time around. So, if you’ve received yours — or, if by the start of next week you haven’t received it — please email Peter Wilkinson, the membership secretary, to let him know.

In The Grim Darkness Of The Far Future …

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do ever since the Vector website went up is to start reprinting content from the 45+ years of back issues. In fact, I had my eye on one essay in particular, from Vector 229, which is now online:

Freedom in an Owned World: Warhammer fiction and the Interzone Generation
By Stephen Baxter

‘”Curse all manling coach drivers and all manling women,” muttered Gotrek Gurnisson, adding a curse in Dwarvish …’

That’s the first line of ‘Geheimnisnacht’ by William King, the first story in the first book of Warhammer fiction, the anthology Ignorant Armies, published in 1989. Since that beginning there has been published a whole string of books, magazines and comics, set in the universes of the highly successful war games and role-playing games marketed by Games Workshop (GW).

Partly because of the involvement of Interzone editor David Pringle, who was editor of the GW line from 1988 to 1991, over the years several prominent British writers of sf and fantasy have contributed to the various series, many from what used to be known as the ‘Interzone generation’. My own involvement was modest, two short stories published in 1989 and 1990; there have been much more significant contributions from David Garnett, Kim Newman, Brian Stableford, Ian Watson and others. Today GW publishes new and reprinted fiction — great mountains of it, in fact — under its ‘Black Library’ imprint. But over the years GW fiction itself has been the subject of a saga of gamers and business suits, of orthodoxies and heresies, of Stakhanovites and rebels, of collapses and recoveries, of intriguing lost possibilities, and of struggles for literary freedom in an ‘owned universe’.

Go read it. It’s very long — over 10,000 words — but it is, I think, my favourite of the articles that have been published in Vector in the time I’ve been reading it. Oddly enough, what prompted me to get around to putting it online was Abigail’s excellent post on Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners”, in which she quite rightly talks about how central the depiction of fannish behaviour is to understanding the story:

… there’s nothing that’s not familiar about the all-consuming devotion with which Jeremy and his friends incorporate The Library into their everyday lives. They watch — and re-watch — the episodes together, as a communal experience, discuss and analyze the events of each episode, and dress up as their favorite characters. I don’t imagine there are many people reading this post who can’t sympathize, or offer an example of similar behavior. For me, it was The X-Files, but I imagine there are people my age who might offer up Babylon 5 as their first fannish love, and folks a bit older who first geeked out over Star Trek: The Next Generation. Whatever television show it was that once captured your heart to the extent that it became part of your life, “Magic for Beginners” will read, in some ways, like excerpts from your own adolescence.

I have previously said that Angel fandom, and specifically the corner of it found in uk.media.tv.angel, was my first fandom. That’s not quite accurate; what it was, was my first fandom that endured, the first fandom in which I formed friendships that are still going strong. That didn’t happen for me with The X-Files, or Babylon 5, or any other earlier TV show — it’s hard to be genuinely fannish about something when you don’t have the internet, and don’t know anyone else who watches it in the way you do. But before all of them, my first actual fandom was Games Workshop and their tabletop fantasy wargames.

So for me, reading Baxter’s essay is not-unlike a trip down memory lane. Except it’s a slightly odd trip, because my involvement with GW coincides quite neatly with the period in which they weren’t putting out fiction. I got into the hobby — or, if you prefer, the cult — sometime in 1993, and got out of it, finally, in 1999. Baxter’s essay spends most time on the period between 1987, when GW fiction was started, and 1995, when Ian Watson’s Chaos Child was the last GW title to be published. By that time I was deep into the hobby, and I remember that, and it was an event, Speaking of the later reissuing of his books, Watson says they added “fictional prefaces denouncing the books, my suggestion, as tissues of heresy and lies, the ideal solution …” but I remember Chaos Child being presented as heretical even at the time of publication. GW stores didn’t stock it; the staff (GW stores having a deliberate “hobby” ethos, the staff and regular customers often got to know each other quite well) would tell teasing tales of how brilliant the first two volumes in the trilogy, now unavailable, were; there were excited rumours that a copy had been sighted in the WH Smith’s round the corner; and so on. I did eventually get my hands on copies of all three of Watson’s books — I think I still have them — and I remember them as being exactly the sort of dark and twisted thing I wanted from 40K fiction.

And then, a couple of years later, I was there for the launch of the short fiction magazine Inferno!, and the subsequent launch of the full Black Library imprint. By that point, or about that time, I was actually working for the Evil Empire myself. I was incredibly picky about getting a part-time job as a teenager — having set my heart on working for GW, nothing else would do — and for some reason my parents let me get away with it. To be fair, it may have been pragmatism on their part, since if I hadn’t been working there and enjoying the staff discount (miniatures at lead weight!) I suspect they’d have gone bankrupt trying to feed my habit. But I got the job, and it was quite an experience — on the one hand, a lot of fun, on the other, a steep learning curve about exactly how corporate GW really was, and how much the hobbyism was a veneer.

Of course, it was still incredibly addictive. I had armies, plural, for all the major games (If you’re wondering, Wood Elves, Chaos Dwarves and Dwarves — now all overpowered runic weapons to the end! — in Warhammer, and Dark Angels, Tyranids and Eldar — now all ludicrously powerful everything to the end! — in 40K; I’m not going to list everything, at least not unless prompted in the comments); was there every games night, Thursdays ’till 8, even when I wasn’t working; spent god knows how many hours painting the miniatures; and went to the exercise in controlled mass hysteria that was Games Day every autumn. Did I care that the universes in which the games were set were thinly-disguised ripoffs of, well, everything else? No, not a bit — although in my defence, I was never as far gone as this guy. Games Workshop is even responsible for my first and only foray into fanfic — if memory serves, I wrote about a young girl from a farm planet who stowed away on a ship to Earth but got captured by an Arbitrator.

What got me out of it, in the end, was going to university. I tried to carry on the job part-time, but quickly realised that wasn’t going to work; I went along to the local gaming club for a while, but never really got to know the people there as well as I’d known the regulars at my home store, not least because I had so much less time to devote to the hobby. I think there was probably a short period during which my GW addiction was tailing off, and my Angel fandom was just starting up, but I don’t think I could say for sure. And while it is my Angel fandom experiences that resonate most strongly when I read “Magic for Beginners”, there are certainly elements of the story — the camaraderie, the anticipation of new releases — that carry back into GW fandom as well.

As for Baxter’s essay, well, having now got into general sf fandom in the way that I have, reading an essay that explains that some of the prehistory of my first fandom is intertwined with what I think of as the modern start of my current fandom (British Boom and all that; I suspect I found Baxter’s Raft at around the same time that I was reading Ian Watson’s Inquisitor novels) inevitably also has enormous resonance. But I think the essay is well worth reading even if you don’t have my personal experience. The list of recognisable names who wrote for GW can be quite startling if you’re not expecting it — Charles Stross, Kim Newman, Nicola Griffith, and Brian Stableford, for starters, with David Pringle editing the initial list — and Baxter does an excellent and entertaining job of filling in the context, as well as investigating the conflicting issues that surround writing franchise fiction. Which, let’s face it, haven’t gone away.

Another thing that hasn’t quite gone away is my desire to play the games. Like a junkie jonesing for a hit, I still sometimes get the urge to break out my armies from their foam-packed stasis and head down to the local store, though I suspect the rules have changed (yet again) since my day, and really (much like World of Warcraft) I know that if I let it gain a foothold, it would swallow my life whole. And then, in the back of my mind, as a compromise measure, I get this crazy notion of contacting the Black Library to ask for some review copies …

Link to the Evidence

And a brief admin note: the latest BSFA mailing (Vector 249 and Matrix 181) should be on its way to members this coming week. Given what happened with the last mailing, though, we don’t want to take anything for granted, so would appreciate confirmations that it’s shown up from as many people as possible, and in particular from people who didn’t receive V248/M180. As usual, when I get my copy I’ll put the TOC for Vector up here.

(Oh, and I’m going to be out tomorrow evening, so I won’t see the last part of The Martians and Us until the repeat on Wednesday. Expect a discussion on Thursday, though.)

London Meeting: Jo Fletcher

The guest at tonight’s BSFA meeting (the last of the year!) is Jo Fletcher, who has done many things but is currently editorial director of Gollancz. She will be interviewed by Claire Weaver.

As usual, the meeting is free to any and all who might be interested, and will be held in the upstairs room of the Star Tavern in Belgravia (there’s a map here). Gather from 5.30 or so, interview starts at 7.00. Pass it on.

Trouble In Paradise

It’s not a Radio Times recommended programme this week, but the second installment of The Martians and Us is as well put together as the first, albeit a bit more obvious in its limitations. There may be an element of personal prejudice here: the theme this time around is utopias and dystopias, which I have to admit is not my specialist subject, or even one of particular interest to me. Much as I love Brave New World (and I do love it dearly), there’s something in most ‘topian fiction that stops me from being hooked. Perhaps it’s the sense of streamlining, of paring down the actual complexity of the world a bit too fa while sidestepping whatever catastrophe or other events led there — although, ironically, “Trouble in Paradise” builds a not-unbelievable case for ‘topian fiction as much more grounded in the real than most sf, presenting it as perhaps the most pure, naked expression of the central dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century that we have.

There are some differences to the first episode. This one spends noticeably more time focused on writers; which is not to say that the works get short shrift, but just to point out that the makers take pains to describe the personal and social contexts from which these works sprang in a way that they didn’t last week. Another change of emphasis can be seen in the selection of talking heads: alongside returning favourites such as Kim Newman, Nigel Kneale, and Brian Stableford, this week saw soundbites from John Carey, Will Self, Iain Banks, Ken Macleod, Margaret Atwood (!), Bernard Crick and Nicholas Murray. This is not a list that in any way effaces genre sf, but it doesn’t half give a lot of weight to more mainstream voices, with the inevitable undertones of “pay attention, this is the respectable bit!” that that engenders. And the presence of Crick (biographer of Orwell) and Murray (biographer of Huxley) hints at the weight that’s going to be placed on their two works — which is, of course, not surprising, but I’m not sure it’s the most interesting way to frame the argument the programme wanted to make, and it seems to thin out the story of British ‘topian fiction in much the same way such fiction seems to me to thin out the world. In this episode, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are the poles around which all else revolves.

Other texts do get a look-in. After a brief primer on Thomas More and Francis Bacon, and a link to the evolutionary/progressive argument for the development of sf aired in last week’s episode (“Darwin had rewritten the past […] writers believed they could predict the future”), we move on to Wells’ A Modern Utopia and The Shape of Things to Come (I don’t know exactly how accurate the description of Wells’ view of eugenics is; it certainly seemed a bit more extreme than other accounts I’ve heard), before arriving at the Two Big Books. We stay there for most of the rest of the episode, with brief (and again, admirably catholic) sidebars on Swastika Night (which I must read), The Year of the Sex Olympics (which I must see), A Clockwork Orange (which I didn’t really get on with), 1985 (which I have no real interest in reading), Judge Dredd (which I haven’t read much of), Doctor Who (which in the 1970s “came as close as anyone has to mass-producing dystopias”, says Kim Newman), Brazil (which is truly wonderful, isn’t it?) and, closest to the present, The Handmaid’s Tale (on what grounds, it’s not entirely clear).

But it’s Brave New World and Nineteen Eight-Four that occupy the lion’s share of the time. The points made range from the slightly fatuous, such as Peter Carey’s assertion that love is a threat in dystopian fiction because if you love someone else, you can’t love the state, which may be true in some books but doesn’t seem to me a very accurate reflection of the complexities of human emotions, to the more insightful, such as the discussions of the aversion to mass culture embedded, in different ways, in both Orwell and Huxley’s books. (Although there is discussion, inevitably, of reality tv, there’s no specific reference to Big Brother — except, cheekily, in the closing eye that marks the scene transitions.) I don’t want to downplay the importance of either novel, since if nothing else the way Orwell and Huxley react to each others’ texts is fascinating. Orwell said that Brave New World had “no relation to the actual future”, and went off and wrote Nineteen Eight-Four; much later Huxley read it, and wrote Orwell a patronising letter saying that that’s all very well, but it’s not how the future is really going to turn out. It was somewhat surprising to me to see how committed to their futures both writers seemed to be, how real their disagreement of vision was. They may not have intended them as straight-down-the-line prediction, but they certainly appears that they intended them as something more than just an argument about possibility, more than just another cautionary tale.

But in a couple of ways, I think the programme simplifies too much. Following through on the point about prediction, Margaret Atwood’s remarks near the end are telling: “For a while it looked like it was going to be Nineteen Eighty-Four,” she says (I paraphrase), “then the wall came down and we all thought it was going to be sex and shopping, and now the pendulum is swinging the other way, and Big Brother is watching over us more and more.” It’s not particularly helpful or particularly accurate to see history in this sort of binary light, I think. And in terms of a discussion of British ‘topian sf, it’s ludicrous to not even mention the Culture in passing — until you realise that the episode isn’t actually making an argument about British ‘topian sf in particular, it’s making an argument about the affect of British sf in general, one built around class and fear — not an invalid argument but one that in this iteration is very selective about its examples. There’s an interesting moment, in the middle of the narrator’s description of how dark and nasty British futures are, when Iain Banks says something along the lines of “Of course, while American sf was all gung-ho and can-do, British sf was very dour and maybe a bit dreary.” I didn’t get the quote down, so the adjectives are almost certainly wrong, but the thing I want to point out is that he was making a past-tense remark, and the programme took it as present-tense. It’s not just the Culture, in other words; all the British sf that (I suspect) most people are reading this are most familiar with, the stuff from the 90s and onwards that is so frequently expansive and extravagant, might as well not exist at all.

Link Me At Infinity

Your Friday-Afternoon Topic For Discussion

From China Mieville’s interview in the November Locus:

“As I go on, I have an increasing sense of the speed at which history moves. Whether you thought all the discussion of New Weird and blah blah blah was ridiculous or useful, one of the reasons I stopped talking about it was that history had moved on. Whatever the movement was, it was in my opinion related to the cultural efflorescence that happened after the protests in Seattle in ’99, when there was an enormous sense of potentiality in the field (and elsewhere) — which to me was about expressing a sense of potentiality in the social and psychic life. The much-vaunted British Boom was from 2001 to 2003, and basically now I suspect it’s on a dying fall. When the mainstream notices something, it’s dead.”

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

So it seems that John Sutherland wrote an article in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend about the encroachment of bloggers and the online world on the literary establishment, which not-at-all predictably caused some upset. (The article itself doesn’t appear to be online, unfortunately.) This morning, the Today Programme featured a brief discussion on the subject between Sutherland and Scott Pack (see also). If you have RealPlayer, you can listen to the discussion here; if you don’t, here’s a handy transcript.

John Humphrys: Who do you trust to tell you that a book you’re thinking of buying or reading is good or bad? Newspaper reviewers, maybe. But increasingly we turn to the internet, apparently, sites like Amazon, and the ordinary punters who’ve read it and tell us what they think. Can we trust them? Does it matter if many of them are rubbish — many of the reviews, I mean? John Sutherland, eminent reviewer himself, Professor of English at University College London says that it does, and he is with me; Scott Pack is the commercial director of the Friday Project, which is an online publisher. John Sutherland: why does it matter, so long as we’re getting other peoples’ opinions?

John Sutherland: Well, it seems to me that we have a terrific book trade in this country, we also have a terrific book reviewing establishment. I mean, today’s Thursday, between Friday and Sunday there’ll be about thirty places where books are reviewed. Now, they’ll be very different opinions, but one thing we can rely on, that most of those reviews, in fact I would say 100% of them, are independent, they’re ethical, and they’re honest. The Times and the TLS will not review HarperCollins books well because in fact they’re both owned by Rupert Murdoch — in fact quite often they give books under that imprint a savage review, if they so think. Now we’ve spent a long time setting up that kind of reviewing establishment, and I would hate it to go the way of — you know, when you go into a DVD shop, a Blockbusters, and you look at the box and it says “greatest movie ever!”

JH: Yes, they’re all the greatest movie ever made, quite so.

JS: … and these are by quote whores …

JH: “Quote whores”!

JS: … you know, from a magazine you’ve never heard of. Now it seems to me that may in fact push that particular product, but you’ve lost something once that happens.

JH: Scott Pack, doesn’t that worry you?

Scott Pack: Not so much. I think that it was a very enjoyable piece that Professor Sutherland wrote, and he made some valid points, the problem I had with it, and the thing that’s annoyed quite a few people in the internet community, was the implication that book reviews should be left to the literati and the academics, and there’s no place for the little people who post on Amazon or these new-fangled bloggers. And I think that’s a shame, I have an issue with that, I think that it’s quite right to point out that you can question the motives of some of the online reviewers, but I don’t think the newspaper reviews are quite as squeaky-clean as he points out. I think it’s reasonable to say that the vast majority of reviews online and the majority of reviews in newspapers are perfectly honest decent reviews from people who love books, and that’s a good thing.

JH: And it is true, John, when you described it you did use the word ‘establishment’.

JS: Absolutely, and it seems to me, you know, that you should be honest about this. Editors choose book reviewers because they write well, and because in fact they have, you know — I mean, James Naughtie on this programme is a book reviewer, not because he’s on the Today Programme but because he’s a good book reviewer, and that’s the criterion editors use. Now it seems to me that not many people read them — this is the point that Scott makes — compared to the number of people who read, or listen to, say Richard and Judy, who are trusted. But in fact they’re not great literary critics. But you wouldn’t want to get rid of Which? magazine because it’s got a very low circulation. You know, that is there to some extent as a signpost, and it seems to me we need these signposts.

JH: And isn’t the danger, Scott Pack, that these … freelance reviewers, if you like, if that’s a sensible way of describing them, will kill off the traditional reviewing industry?

SP: No, I don’t think it will, I think there really is a place for both. Clearly more and more people are turning to the internet for advice —

JH: Exactly!

SP: — but of course there’s a place for book reviews, I think they’re great, I think it’s true that perhaps their influence has diminished over the past 10, 20 years — but there’s still a place for them, they’re still very important, and they’re still write by some incredibly articulate and informative individuals. The point, of course, is that the majority of reviewers online are doing it purely out of the love of books and for free, whereas we do have to point out that the people doing reviews for newspapers are getting paid for it, and they need to fill the space. That doesn’t mean that either of them are biased — it just means that there’s a place for both, and it depends on who you trust.

JH: I take your point — John Sutherland, couldn’t you say that anybody’s opinion — this is reducing it to the absurd, perhaps — but almost anyone’s opinion is as valid as the next person’s? You’re a distinguished professor, you might find a book particularly fascinating and wonderful, I might find it rubbish. You can’t arbitrate, can you?

JS: No. I mean, there was a time when Scott was the most important reviewer in this country, in the sense that he set up what essentially was the stock of Waterstones. And that was a critical judgement on his part, it was done ethically I’m sure, and it was done because he thought these books were the best books, and they were also books that were going to sell. But the thing is, you have to trust the people who make these judgements. People go to Richard and Judy or Oprah not because they’re great literary critics but because they trust them. And that question of trust, it seems to me, is not always evident on the commentary you get on the web. I wrote something which displeased bloggers and I got death threats. Now, that is not reviewing. That just seems to me, as it were, the judgement of the lynch mob. And there’s a lot of that out on the web.

JH: Well, I wish we could pursue that, we’ve run out of time I’m afraid, but John Sutherland and Scott Pack, thank you both very much indeed.

Incandescence

Greg Egan is writing a new novel, and his website has the tiniest of extracts:

“Almost everything about this world remains to be discovered,” Lahl said. “Until someone is willing to pursue the matter vigorously, the few scraps of information I’m carrying will mean very little.”

Rakesh was beginning to feel as if he was being prodded awake from a stupefying dream that had gone on so long he’d stopped believing it could ever end. He’d come to this node, this cross-roads, in the hope of encountering exactly this kind of traveller, but in ninety-six years he’d learnt nothing from the people passing through that he could not have heard on his home world. He’d made friends among the other node-dawdlers, and they passed the time together pleasantly enough, but his old, naive fantasy of colliding with a stranger bearing a surfeit of mysteries — a weary explorer announcing, “I’ve seen enough for one lifetime, but here, take this crumb from my pocket” — had been buried long ago.

Incandescence is “likely to be published in early 2008”, the page says. Hooray! [via]

The Martians and Us

Here is everything that’s wrong with Radio Times:

The Martians and Us: From Apes to Aliens

The first of a brainy three-part history of British science fiction looks at the preoccupation of genre writers with evolution. The programme explores the progress-v-decay debate through the work of professors of the prescient from HG Wells to Arthur C Clarke. It uses psychedelic visualisations and book extracts read with sonorous gravity by Peter Capaldi, while well-chosen clips from Doctor Who, Things to Come and 2001: a Space Odyssey distract from periods of excessive chin-stroking.

— Mark Braxton

Because heaven forbid a television documentary take science fiction seriously.

Did anyone else watch this? I have to say I was impressed, and there isn’t even an implied “for tv” in that statement. The Martians and Us is one of the flagship programmes in the “Science Fiction Britannia” season that BBC Four is running at the moment. It looks like a pretty good season in general, to the point where, if I’m not careful, I can see myself doing nothing but watching BBC Four for the next three weeks. For example, tonight at 10.55 there’s an extended interview with Iain Banks ; and on Monday 27th there’s what looks like an interesting drama based on a Wyndham short. I’m not sure when whatever programme is going to use the footage filmed at last month’s ton is going to air, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

It’s tempting to wonder whether the season got commissioned, in whole or in part, off the back of the success of Russell T. Davies’ Doctor Who, not least because damn near the only present-tense moment in the first episode of this series is a clip from Rob Shearman’s first-season episode “Dalek” — specifically, the death of the last Dalek — complete with narration that assumes familiarity with, say, Rose in a way that familiarity is clearly not assumed when talking about even H.G. Wells. That aside, though, whoever’s behind it all has indeed taken science fiction seriously, lining up an impressive array of talking heads, giving them enough space to say useful things, and structuring the episodes (or at least episode one) around reasonably sensible arguments. If I have a reservation about the series, it’s that it looks like it’s going to cut off at about 1980; rather than being a linear history, the three episodes seem to describe three strands of british sf. Episodes two and three are “dystopias” and “the end of the world“, respectively — for which read “Orwell” and “Wyndham”, I assume — and episode one, which took as its theme “evolution”, didn’t get past 1968.

But that’s ok, because it allowed the episode to deal with its touchstones — Wells; Stapledon; Quatermass; The Midwich Cuckoos; and Arthur C. Clarke — in some depth, with sidebar trips into Doctor Who, Buck Rogers and others. The use of evolution as an organising principle puts the focus squarely on the scientific romance tradition, and mostly works well, as in the moment when, after a long discussion of The Time Machine, the focus switches to Doctor Who, and a shot of the first Doctor meeting primitive savages. They’re in the deep past, not the deep future, but after the preceding discussion about how evolution does not guarantee progress, the narrator’s comparison — “meet the Morlocks” — still feels apt. Similarly, The War of the Worlds is linked to the we-are-the-Martians ending of Quatermass and the Pit, and both are used to develop, in combination with the “education turns you into an alien” theme identified in The Midwich Cuckoos, a more general theme of alien intervention in human development, most particularly as explored in Clarke’s work.

This is a series, then, focused on the literary history of British sf, with media (by and large, rightly) seen as responding to or adapting earlier work, and it’s a focus that’s also evident in the featured commentators. There are critics (Roger Luckhurst, Patrick Parrinder), writer-critics (Brian Aldiss, Brian Stableford, Kim Newman), and writers (Doris Lessing, Stephen Baxter, China Mieville, and from tv-land, the late Nigel Kneale), with a relative (Mary Shenai, daughter of Olaf Stapledon) and a biologist (the eminently reliable Steve Jones) rounding things out. There are, in other words, a bunch of people who really like science fiction, and really get science fiction — the whole awe and wonder and majesty bit — and whatever Mark Braxton may say about chin-stroking, for me that shone through. So Kim Newman gets to be Kim Newman, throwing off irreverent but somehow telling trivia; Brian Aldiss reads the famous opening of The War of the Worlds, and can’t quite stifle a little yelp of glee when he’s done; China Mieville talks about H.G. Wells’s love of the weird; and Doris Lessing and Stephen Baxter wax lyrical about the mind-expanding effects of Starmaker. The narration is mostly good, too, striking just the right balance between witty and informed. On Stapeldon, for instance: “By night he taught philosophy; by day he thought up plans for the future of mankind.” On the arrival of American sf in Britain after World War Two: “Overcoloured, overblown, and over here.” And on the world before Darwin and deep time, before The Time Machine: “There was time, but not much of it.”

And there’s Arthur C. Clarke, who provides what is probably the episode’s most powerful moment. Towards the end of the episode, the discussion shifts to how the reality of space travel overtook science fiction; and having just been talking about Childhood’s End and 2001, the director goes back to Clarke for a comment. And he says, slowly, something like, “I really thought there would be much more space travel than there has been.” Pause. “That’s a failure of imagination, I suppose.” There was for me something tremendously sad about that pause, but tremendously dignified, too. It’s a moment that would have made the episode worth watching even if I’d been gritting my teeth the rest of the way through, because it says that science fiction should be about possibilities, not dreams. And that (it says, and I agree) is an important distinction.